Does Shopify have analytics? Yes — here's exactly what you get
Every Shopify fact on this page was read on a Shopify-owned surface — help centre, pricing page or changelog — on 26 July 2026.
That's the answer. The rest of this page is what most merchants actually want to know: what's inside it in 2026 — including the parts that quietly stopped being plan-gated — and the specific questions it cannot answer, so you know when the built-in reports are enough and when they aren't.
What's inside Shopify Analytics in 2026
Shopify's reporting has three surfaces (help.shopify.com, read 26 Jul 2026):
- The Analytics dashboard — customisable metric cards over sales, sessions, conversion and more, real-time since the "new Analytics" experience became the default for all stores on 11 June 2025.
- Reports — pre-built reports across eleven categories: Acquisition, Behaviour, Customers, Finance, Fraud, Inventory, Marketing, Order, Profit, Retail sales and Sales. You can open any of them, change it, and save the result as a custom data exploration.
- Live View — a real-time world map. Blue dots are visitor sessions, purple dots are orders; "visitors right now" covers the last 5 minutes, cart and checkout activity the last 10.
Under the reports sits ShopifyQL: since 11 June 2025 every analytics report carries a query editor at the top, so you can type a query and repopulate the report below it.
Customisable metric cards over sales, sessions, conversion and more.
ShopifyQL query editor — at the top of every report since 11 Jun 2025.
Open any of them, change it, save the result as a custom data exploration.
A diagram, not a screenshot — Shopify's own labels, drawn in Mtrix's interface so nothing here can be mistaken for a capture of a real admin.
The Behaviour category is the one store operators use most: a conversion-rate funnel breakdown, conversion over time, search terms with no results, sessions by landing page and by device. The Customers category goes further than most people expect — more on that below, because it's a genuine strength.
The plan question everyone gets wrong
Most articles ranking for this question still say custom reports need the Advanced plan. That has been wrong since 11 June 2025. Shopify's own pages are unambiguous, all read 26 Jul 2026:
- The Analytics help hub: "Shopify Analytics' main features are available to merchants on any Shopify subscription plan."
- The Basic plan feature page: "The Basic plan comes with access to all reports, including the ability to create custom reports with data explorations."
- The reports overview: custom data explorations can be saved "regardless of your Shopify subscription."
What still differs by plan is small, and worth stating precisely:
| What | Where it sits | Shopify's wording (read 26 Jul 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| "The most comprehensive reports" + activation of predicted values for certain reports | Advanced | Advanced plan feature page |
| Multi-store reporting | Plus only | changelog, 9 Sep 2025 |
| Rollouts experiments (A/B testing) | Grow plan or higher | Rollouts help page |
| Analytics Insights | Stores with 10+ weekly orders | changelog, 20 Apr 2026 |
If a competing article told you to upgrade for custom reports, it was written before mid-2025.
Shopify also has real-user speed data — most merchants never find it
Another thing the "Shopify has no analytics" genre gets wrong: Shopify ships a real web-performance report, under Online store → Web performance. It measures LCP, INP and CLS from real visitors — "actual visitor experiences, not simulated tests" — with numbered markers on the graph for app installs, theme updates and new code.
Its limits are stated in Shopify's own documentation: the data "might be delayed by up to 36 hours," it keeps only "the last 90 days," and it's those three metrics. But it exists, it's real field data, and you should look at it before paying anyone for a speed audit.
Where Shopify Analytics is genuinely strong
Four things the built-in reports do that most paid analytics tools cannot:
- It is the system of record for money. Shopify Analytics reads the order ledger, not a browser script. Gross sales, net sales, refunds, profit and margin are exact — no ad-blocker, no JavaScript failure, no cookie banner touches an order row. When a browser-based tool and Shopify disagree about revenue, believe Shopify.
- Profit reporting. Gross profit and margin at the product level, from your own cost data. Very few analytics products can compute margin at all.
- Customer analysis most brands buy a separate tool for. Cohort analysis with retention curves, an 11-group RFM segmentation, and a predicted spend tier — built into the Customers reports. Mtrix does not ship an RFM report; Shopify gives you one free.
- It ships constantly. In 2026 alone the changelog added chart annotations from apps (24 Jul), bubble and sunburst charts (17 Jun), theme and checkout A/B testing via Rollouts (5 Jun), cumulative metrics (19 May), dashboard insights (28 Apr) and targets with gauges (27 Apr). Anyone telling you Shopify Analytics is abandoned hasn't read the changelog.
What it genuinely does not do
The cleanest evidence is Shopify's own analytics fields reference — the page that enumerates every metric and dimension the reporting layer exposes (read 26 Jul 2026). It contains no fields for:
- Session recordings — you can see that conversion dropped; you cannot watch a single session.
- Click positions or heatmaps — no click density, no rage clicks, no interaction maps.
- Scroll depth — no way to know how far anyone scrolled on any page.
- JavaScript errors — no error report exists anywhere in the Analytics surface.
- Per-page performance depth — performance lives in the separate three-metric report above.
This isn't an oversight Shopify is about to fix quietly; it's a scope decision. Shopify's own App Store carries a market of third-party session-recording and heatmap apps, because merchants who want to see behaviour buy it elsewhere.
One more caveat from the same reference, worth knowing when your session counts look low: sessions are "only counted when visitors consent to cookies through your cookie banner." Shopify's traffic numbers are consent-gated too.
Can you A/B test in Shopify Analytics?
Since 5 June 2026, yes — Rollouts can experiment with whole themes and checkout configurations, on the Grow plan or higher. If you've read that Shopify can't A/B test, that's stale too.
What the experiment reports contain is the honest differentiator (Rollouts analytics help page, read 26 Jul 2026): a theme experiment reports conversion rate, bounce rate, reached-checkout rate and added-to-cart rate. Revenue metrics — gross sales, average order value — appear on launches, not experiments, and the help documentation publishes no significance, sample-size or duration guidance for calling a winner. Rollouts also swaps whole configurations only — one theme against another — and Shopify states that "headless and custom storefront checkouts aren't supported."
So: Shopify tests configurations and reads rates. Testing a single price block, judging it on revenue per visitor with a probability-to-be-best readout, and rolling out the winner from the report is a different product — that one's an experimentation platform.
Shopify Analytics vs Google Analytics — the 30-second version
Merchants bolt GA4 on via the Google & YouTube channel and then discover the two never agree. Three documented reasons: Shopify's sessions end after 30 minutes "and at midnight UTC" while GA4's don't; Shopify attributes conversions by last click while GA4 defaults to data-driven attribution; and — Shopify's own help centre says this outright — "customers can use browser extensions to block Google Analytics from tracking their sessions and purchases." Order-ledger data doesn't get blocked; scripts do.
The full reconciliation is its own page: Shopify analytics vs Google Analytics. And if the question is "what should replace GA4 entirely," start with the Google Analytics alternatives page.
The question Shopify Analytics can't answer
Every report above answers what happened. Sales are down, conversion dipped, mobile bounces more, search for "gift set" returns nothing. What none of them can answer is why — because the "why" lives in behaviour Shopify doesn't capture: the session where the shopper rage-clicked a dead size chart, the scroll map showing nobody reaches your add-to-cart on mobile, the JavaScript error that only fires in Safari.
That's the line where merchants outgrow the built-in reports, and it's the line Mtrix is built on. The number and the session are one click apart: analytics shows the checkout drop-off rate, session replay plays the drop-offs — rage clicks, dead clicks and form abandonment already detected and filterable. Click and scroll heatmaps come without buying an app. Errors are captured and grouped — four thousand occurrences read as one issue with a count — and you can watch the session that produced any of them. And experiments read in money: revenue per visitor, conversion rate and add-to-cart rate with probability-to-be-best, no cap on how many tests you run.
Keep Shopify Analytics — it's your ledger, and it's good. Add the behaviour layer when "what" stops being enough.